THE PRICE OF FEAR

Quote at top of story: What is happening increasingly is large numbers of
people are being treated as if they are suspects when they haven't done
anything wrong."

- -- Doug Honing, public education director for the American Civil Liberties
Union of Washington

A man and woman sat in their car that idled at a stoplight along Broadway in
north Everett.

The woman watched the traffic slide slowly past the car's window. The man
watched the woman watch the cars glide by.

And on a light pole perched above the intersection, the unblinking eye of a
video surveillance camera watched them both.

The surveillance scene, captured on videotape in March by the Everett Police
Department, was a test of the city's plan to install a network of security
cameras at "high crime" areas in the city's core sometime this summer. The
cameras, proposed as crime-fighting tools by business owners and neighbors
tired of bumping into suspected drug dealers and hookers, received city
council approval early this month. See map at end of story

Price tag: $106,000.

And Everett is not alone among local governments investing big bucks in
technology that allows authorities to watch citizens or search through their
pockets and purses. The increased surveillance will increase public safety,
backers contend. Not everyone is so sure. Some worry about the sacrifice of
individual rights as more and more cameras and metal detectors creep into
our daily lives.

The local investment in security technology is growing:

- -- Snohomish County has tightened access around its courthouse and other
buildings where legal proceedings are conducted, spending nearly $120,000 on
airport-style screening devices, including X-ray machines and metal
detectors. Anything that could be used as a weapon, including small
pocketknives, is banned.

- -- For the first time ever, the county this year made security part of its
annual budget. About two-thirds of the more than $434,000 it expects to
spend will pay for a small platoon of hired security guards who now search
every citizen hoping to enter certain public buildings.

- -- Community Transit is spending about half a million dollars developing a
seamless video surveillance grid covering its park-and-ride lots and
eventually all its local buses. Metro of King County will probably soon add
digital cameras to some of its fleet of 1,200 buses at an estimated cost of
$6,000 to $8,000 per bus. For years, video cameras have monitored movements
inside the downtown Seattle Bus Tunnel and the new Sound Transit Express
buses will come with cameras pointing at passengers.

- -- School buses throughout the county have cameras and the movements of
students in some Everett and Mukilteo district high schools are captured by
cameras.

- -- The Legislature recently approved Gov. Gary Locke's request for a $9
million school safety package that could include cameras, metal detectors
and grants for school security guards.

The security industry in the U.S. is big business, with annual revenues
estimated at as much as $100 billion, said Richard Chace, communications
director for the Alexandria, Va. -based Security Industry Association.

Providing security services and technology to local governments is a growing
part of that business, Chace said, but exactly how large is hard to say.
What is clear is that more and more local governments see the need for such
technology, and the security-related industry is happily meeting the demand.

"That's one of the things our industry has finally realized: There is a huge
untapped market," Chace said.

Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel knows money spent on security is money
lost for more traditional government expenses, such as road improvements,
teachers in classrooms and police on the street.

Still, Drewel said it is impossible to ignore incidents such as a triple
murder in the King County Courthouse in 1995, in which an angry, jealous man
ambushed his estranged wife and two of her friends as they waited on a bench
outside a courtroom. Preventing similar incidents is a new government
priority, he said.

"I don't know if it is money well spent, but it would appear to be money
that needs to be spent," Drewel said.

But some of what is pitched in the name of public safety is raising
eyebrows.

Doug Honig, public education director for the American Civil Liberties Union
of Washington, said the trend toward video surveillance of public spaces,
random drug testing at schools, and other measures is creating a "society of
suspects" in America.

While the ACLU isn't opposed to metal detectors or other security
technologies, some of what is happening now seems to ignore constitutional
guarantees that people not be investigated by government unless there is a
reason to believe they have committed a crime.

"What is happening increasingly is large numbers of people are being treated
as if they are suspects when they haven't done anything wrong," Honig said.

The presence of security technology doesn't just make it more difficult to
get into public buildings, it shapes the way we view the world, said Gary
Marx, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and
an author of an award-winning book on the effects of covert police
operations and new information-gathering techniques.

"Technologies are not simply tools to get a job done," said Marx, who before
heading to Colorado spent 25 years at Harvard and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology as a professor specializing in criminal justice.

Surveillance and security measures send two important cultural messages,
Marx said. "One is the world is a dangerous place and we need these
measures," he said. "The second cultural message is 'We don't trust you.' "

Everett police hope surveillance cameras on public streets will create an
environment where crooks feel uncomfortable and people who live and work in
those areas have less to cause them fear, according to Lt. Marty Parker, who
has been overseeing the project for the department.

Parker doesn't believe video surveillance technology is a magic bullet for
fighting crime, but a tool that could make a difference.

As part of a yearlong review of the proposal here, Parker studied police
experiences with surveillance cameras in Tukwila, Tacoma, Spokane and
elsewhere.

The devices have been linked to significant reductions in crime, Parker
said. For example, there was a 40 percent drop in criminal activity along a
one-mile stretch of Pacific Highway in Tukwila, where prostitution once
flourished.

At the same time, Parker concedes the presence of cameras probably just
moves crime elsewhere. In Tacoma, for example, trouble returned to a
problem-plagued block when one of the cameras there that was clearly visible
was removed, he said.

The city plans to install eight wireless video cameras around downtown and
along north Broadway, most mounted on light poles or atop buildings. Each of
the devices will broadcast a signal to a monitoring station. The cameras
will be remotely operated, and are designed to scan up to 360 degrees or
zoom in on suspicious activity, Parker said.

When the city tested one of the cameras in March, it broadcast a signal
clear enough to read the numbers off a license plate several hundred feet
away. The camera also was able to peer through the windows of a convenience
store, at night, to monitor the activities of those inside.

The cameras won't be used to peek into homes or conduct surveillance simply
for the sake of spying, or to assemble a videotaped intelligence file on the
citizens of Everett, Police Chief Jim Scharf said.

Before the cameras are switched on, the department will first develop
written protocols for how the devices may be operated, who will have access
to the information they gather and how that information will be stored and
used, Scharf said.

"I understand concerns that some have that this would be utilized to pry
into the affairs of citizens of this community. That's just not the case,"
Scharf said.

People may not have an expectation of privacy on a public street, but they
do have an expectation that government won't be recording everything they
do, and that is why surveillance proposals have been shot down in other
cities, notably Oakland, Calif., said the ACLU's Honig.

"Obviously, police are out in public, looking at people, but a machine sees
vastly more than an individual officer ever will," he said. "It is there all
the time."

Also, the ACLU points out, there are few guidelines, and fewer laws,
governing video surveillance by governments.

That situation has led to problems, particularly in England, according to
Barry Steinhardt, national associate director for the ACLU.

In England, video surveillance has been a fact of life for more than a
decade, with more than 100,000 of the devices reportedly monitoring streets,
municipal buildings, parking lots and housing projects. The systems are so
much a part of the local landscape that British newspapers refer to the
cameras only by abbreviation -- CCTV -- which everybody seems to know stands
for closed-circuit television.

England's CCTV system has caught criminals, but in a way that gives chills
even to some proponents of video surveillance here. In England, many of the
cameras are linked to computers equipped with face recognition software,
which automatically compares video images captured by the cameras with
databases containing images of people's faces.

British surveillance videos also have wound up as public entertainment. A
film compiled from street video scenes, called "Caught in the Act," included
footage of sex acts and other intimate contact by people apparently unaware
they were being watched.

"In this age of 'America's Funniest Home Videos' and the widespread
commercial uses of amateur video, we need laws -- not guidelines -- that
protect the privacy and security of tapes and guarantee the swift
destruction of tapes without evidentiary value," Steinhardt told a meeting
of security and police officials in Washington, D.C., last month.

The April meeting was organized by the Security Industry Association and the
International Association of Chiefs of Police, both of which recognize that
rules are needed to ensure successful and proper use of closed-circuit
television by governments, said security industry spokesman Chace.

The meeting produced enough draft guidelines to fill eight pages, and more
work is being done to finalize the protocols. The guidelines cover
everything from appropriate use of security cameras for surveillance to
training for operators, and restrictions on release of video tapes or
digital recordings.

The guidelines are based on studies of experiences in U.S. communities that
have used CCTV systems, both the successes and the failures, Chace said.

"If you don't do these things, you are not going to have a very successful
program," he said.

At this point, local governments appear to have done little to establish
ironclad guidelines for appropriate use of surveillance and security
technology.

When the tape in a CT bus camera could have possibly helped settle a dispute
with a passenger recently, it was discovered the tape had already been
reused. However, if it's clear that a crime has been committed, the tape is
saved and turned over to police, said John Aune, CT's manager of facilities
and security, and is not available for public viewing.

Joyce Olson, CT's director, credits the cameras for cutting security
incidents on the buses. Bus drivers say they feel safer with the cameras on
board.

"I noticed a dramatic drop in unruly teen-agers on my buses right after the
cameras went in (in 1996)," Dave Thompson, a CT driver, said recently.

Pat Connelly, a CT driver who is also the financial secretary for the
Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1576, credits the cameras with curtailing
other disorderly activities on the buses.

But Dan Williams, spokesman for Metro, said no one believes that cameras
would have prevented the killing of a Metro driver last year on the Aurora
Bridge in Seattle.

Besides the driver, two passengers, including the gunman, died on the bus
that plunged off the bridge.

The cameras, which will probably not be installed on Metro buses for at
least a year, will be on specific routes and used mainly as a crime
deterrent and evidence for claims against the bus agency, he said.

The King County Prosecutor's Office will study the procedure for access to
the video images, he said.

Access to the Snohomish County Courthouse has become more of a challenge
following new security rules that went into effect there in late March. The
rules, approved by the county's judges, ban anything that could be used as a
weapon, including key chain pepper spray dispensers, tools, small
pocketknives and decorative chains longer than 20 inches.

To enter the courthouse, visitors must first submit to a weapons screening,
a procedure that includes having purses and packages scanned through an
X-ray machine and a walk through the metal detector.

Suzanne Klaas, interim director of the county's facilities management
department, said weapons screening between February and mid-May turned up
more than 2,400 weapons, including handguns, knives, mace and explosives.

"The threats are out there," she said. "The real life situations are
occurring and growing."

On the other hand, Klaas acknowledged that many of the "weapons" screened
from the courthouse under new security rules include items perfectly legal
to carry and viewed as unthreatening elsewhere, including small pocketknives
and pocket tool sets. Moreover, she acknowledged, the "explosives" found in
the screenings weren't bombs, but fireworks found in someone's purse, and in
one case, a fuel can, battery, wires and other items a man said he needed as
evidence in a civil case.

As part of its tougher security at the courthouse, the county also requires
anyone with a cellular phone or pager to prove those devices aren't weapons
before they can be brought inside.

The pager screening is necessary to make sure those devices haven't been
altered to be part of a bomb, Klaas said. She is unable to produce any
evidence that has occurred here or elsewhere.

Mark Vinson is president of Olympic Security Services Inc., the company that
provides the security guards who screen for weapons at the courthouse. The
company also provides security at airports and other courthouses in Oregon
and California.

Vinson said he's privy to law enforcement and Federal Aviation
Administration alerts "that actually show a pager being changed into a
deadly weapon," such as a component of a bomb, or a small handgun.

"I do know that it can be done, and if it can be done, it could be done in
Snohomish County," he said.

But if pager weapons are around here, police aren't finding them.

"No one, in recent memory, has come across any pagers or cell phones
converted into weapons or devices of destruction," Everett police spokesman
Elliott Woodall said. The same is true for the Snohomish County Sheriff's
Office, spokeswoman Jan Jorgensen said.

It is important that whatever steps society takes to make itself safer,
individual rights are respected and the solutions don't create more
problems, the ACLU's Honig said.

"We have to obviously be concerned about safety and security, be we have to
do this in a way that is intelligent and doesn't overreact," he said.

You can call Herald Writer Scott North at 425-339-3431 or send e-mail to
north@heraldnet.com .

You can call Herald Writer Bob Wodnik at 425-339-3437 or send e-mail to
wodnik@heraldnet.com .